Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Xiaomi’s sub $100 Mi Box may arrive as soon as October

Cast your mind back to Google I/O in May and
you might remember seeing a demo or two of Xiaomi’s Android powered Mi Box
set-top box. Not much has been heard about it since then, but sources close to
Xiaomi suggest that we may finally be nearing a launch date, possibly as soon
as next month.

Reportedly, the Mi Box is scheduled to launch
in select markets in “early Q4 2016”, which means that we could see the little
TV box appear as early as October, just next month. Importantly, the Mi Box was
and is still expected to be the company’s first major product launch in the US.
Xiaomi has kept tight lipped about the box’s cost so far, but the report
suggests that it will be priced at less than $100.

Back in May, Xiaomi talked up the Mi Box’s
capabilities, which include 60fps 4K video decoding, HDR support for more vivid
colors, and Google’s Android TV 6.0 software, complete with smart search
capabilities. The Mi Box also wants to offer Android gaming in the living room
with its quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU and Mali 450 GPU processing package. Although
that’s unlikely to rival the likes of the NVIDIA Shield TV for performance.

The reason for the seemingly long delay
between the announcement of the Mi Box and its launch is hard to pin down. Some
speculate that Xiaomi is still stocking up on important patents that are
essential for doing business in markets outside of Asia.

There’s still no official word from Xiaomi on
the matter, but we imagine that the company won’t want to delay the launch much
longer. Sadly, we’ll probably still have to wait even longer before Xiaomi
officially launches its first smartphone in the US.